“I had a good meeting with Laura today,” I said a little too brightly. “She’s sending out the spec, there’s still a chance it could sell.” I tried not to sound like a desperate Willy Loman, but acting was never my forte, and she wasn’t convinced.
“It’s not just that,” she started. “Something happened while you were gone.” Her lip started to quiver. Libby was not easily rattled. I suddenly got scared.
“What happened?” I asked. She sucked in her cheeks, like she was trying not to cry. “Lib, what is it?” I coaxed. Her hands were shaking. I pulled out a chair for her, but she waved it off.
“I think Holly tried to kill herself,” she finally blurted, and then she started to cry.
She told me about seeing Evan carrying Holly’s limp body out of the house, and how she ran outside to help him. She described how she’d taken hold of Holly’s cold, pruney feet, and how she pulled on them to get her into Evan’s back seat. “She had us all over to dinner, and I didn’t even say thank you!” She was sobbing hard now. I reached for her and pulled her close.
“OK, first of all, we all said thank you, and her pain has nothing to do with you, so don’t go there,” I said into her hair. I realized I had no “second of all,” so I just held her and let her cry.
“It’s just not working out how I thought,” she finally said, and I knew her despair was not just about Holly. “I think we’d have a better life back in New York.”
I thought about going back to a cramped apartment in the city, and to a job that forced me to live out of suitcases for months at a time. I thought about trading my car for a MetroCard and cramming into the subway when I couldn’t get a cab. But mostly, I thought about having to tell all my family and friends that the grand California adventure was a failure. That I was a failure. That I had failed my wife.
I was about to try to put this conversation off, say something like Let’s talk about it when you’re not so upset, when my phone rang in my pocket. I looked at her for the OK to answer it. She nodded, Go ahead.
I pulled out my phone and looked at the caller ID. It was my agency. I got a little dopamine rush like I always do as I answered. “This is Andy.”
An assistant told me, “I have Laura for you,” and a moment later my agent clicked on. Her words were like a dam breaking. I had to lean against the wall to keep from being toppled by the tidal wave of emotions that slammed through my chest—shock and disbelief, followed by a blast of pure euphoria.
I turned to look at Libby. Her brows were frozen in perplexed anticipation.
“Jack Kimball wants to buy my script,” I said.
Her hand flew over her mouth. She looked unsure so I assured her.
“I sold a movie,” I said. “The offer came in five minutes ago.”
We looked at each other in stunned silence. And then we did something we hadn’t done for a very long time.
We held each other, and we laughed.
HOLLY
Three months ago
I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and ran a bath.
The hot water wasn’t good for my inflamed knee, but neither was insomnia, and I thought soaking in the tub might quiet my mind.
As scalding water poured out of the tap, I let my tears mingle with the steamy air to camouflage my grief. But it didn’t work. Because grief isn’t like sadness.
Sadness is thick, like a heavy fog that clouds your vision so you can’t see any of the good things around you.
But grief is something else. It’s not fog, it’s a storm. It rages inside you, tearing at your organs, pulling at your heart, lungs, skin, until they feel like they are going to rip wide open, exposing the most delicate parts of you, leaving them bloody and raw.
Grief is savage, like love. I think maybe it’s the same thing as love? It’s love that is trapped inside you, a bird that can’t spread its wings so it flaps violently in protest until it’s exhausted and broken and utterly without hope.
No, grief is not sadness. It’s love that is desperately, urgently lost, an intense longing that pools in your lungs and balls up in your throat, so that when you try to talk it just pours out of you like sludge.
I understood now why grieving people turned to God. I didn’t go to church anymore, but I read enough of the Bible to know God’s capacity to receive love is limitless. He could absorb all that grief-stricken love and bounce it back at you, filling you up, making you whole again.
When I was a kid growing up in the desert of Bakersfield, I used to daydream of living in the woods, surrounded by streams and pine trees that stretched halfway to heaven. I never loved the white-hot heat of the West. If God gave me a second chance, I hoped it would be far away from here, in that emerald forest of my dreams.